Don't just vendor - rebuild the ecosystem and persuade the vendor to work on software management ...

Posted Jan 28, 2025 10:46 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Don't just vendor - rebuild the ecosystem and persuade the vendor to work on software management ... by rahulsundaram
Parent article: Vendoring Go packages by default in Fedora

Part of the problem is that users have demands that cannot be met by RPM or dpkg as designed for use in a distro. Users have a very wide definition of "regression", covering everything from "used to work, doesn't any more" through to "this pixel of the UI used to be #ffeedd, it's now #ffeede, but nothing else has changed", and user expectation is that if they encounter a regression of any form, there is a quick and easy workaround.

This puts distros in a bind; I need to be able to simultaneously install both the latest version of something (so that I get the bugfixes I need from it), and also to parallel-install the old version of it (so that I can avoid the perceived regression from the new version). And worse, distros don't particularly want to provide the old, known buggy, version, because, well, it's known buggy.

There is no easy solution here - not least because some regressions will be because a thing was buggy, and the user depended on side effects of that bug. There are only different tradeoffs to be made - and Linux distros have made tradeoffs focused on fewer bugs that result in users moving to other tooling (CPAN, CTAN etc) because it's easier to switch tooling than to ask distros to do what they want.